Field of Endeavor
The present disclosure relates to solar power plants, and, more particularly, to solar boilers.
Brief Description of the Related Art
A concentrated solar power plant uses solar boilers generally including various panels of fluid-carrying tubes that are heated by focusing sunrays through thereon, in turn heating fluid to be utilized for producing electricity. Tube panel arrangement for configuring the solar boilers are quite important for effectively utilizing solar flux without any wastage or leakage and failure of tubes.
Typically, solar boilers operate on a daily cycle, shutting down in the night. During daytime, the tubes panels receive highly concentrated solar flux, while cold at night. The high solar flux and frequency of operation cycles create challenges with regard to managing thermal expansion and contraction of the tube panels. In order to overcome such challenges, various designs and methods are presented from time to time for configuring boilers. For example, to manage the challenge of expansion and contraction of the panels, two adjacent panels are spaced by a gap during configuring the solar boilers so that the panels may easily expand while intercepting the high solar flux when incident thereon. However, before such expansion of the panels, such gaps between the panels may result in substantial loss of the solar flux, known as solar leakage. Further, through such gaps between any two adjacent panels of the solar receiver, high concentrated solar flux passes, which may damage internal components of the solar receiver. Furthermore, if the adjacent panels of the boiler are arranged without any spacing or gap therebetween to avoid loss of the solar flux or damage of boilers' internal components before expansion of the panels, then there may be chances of breakage of panels or bending out of the tubes from the panels.
While previously known solar boilers may have generally been considered satisfactory for their intended purposes, there has remained a need in the art for solar boilers that can be improved to be substantially more manageable in terms of avoiding solar flux leakage and breakage of panels or bending out of tubes.